1

The childhood of a genius

S

artre was born in Paris on June 21 , 1905 , to Jean-Baptiste
and Anne-Marie Sartre. His mother was ne ́e Schweitzer, from a
prominent, liberal Alsatian family, and through her he was related to
Nobel Peace laureate Albert Schweitzer, whom he once described as “my
cousin Albert [who] was not bad at the organ.”^1 His father, an ensign in
the French navy, was on duty overseas at the time of Sartre’s birth. On a
previous posting he had contracted a fever, and a year after Sartre’s birth
he died of it, at the age of 30. Rather unsympathetically, Sartre observed
that his father had had the good manners to die early in his life, thus
leaving him without a superego.^2 Sartre was raised by his mother in her
parents’ home, for the first five years in the Parisian suburb of Meudon,
and from 1911 in their Paris apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens.
Except for what he depicts as a rather painful interlude in La Rochelle
on the southwest coast of France, where he lived with his mother and her
new husband, Joseph Mancy, from the fall of 1917 to the spring of 1920 ,
Sartre was raised and educated in Paris, where he attended two

(^1) Jean-Paul Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,”Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken,
trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (New York: Pantheon, 1977 ), 36 ; hereafterL/Swith
2 title of essay and page.
Jean-Paul Sartre,The Words (Les Mots), trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George
Braziller, 1964 ), 11 – 12 ; hereafterWordsand “F” for the French original (Words-F 19 ). If it
is any consolation, Sartre is just as harsh on himself in this brilliant little autobiographical
“novel,” which he insists is “true.” More on this later. It is commonly acknowledged that
“Words” is a better rendition of “Les mots” than the published title, which retains the
definite article. This work is the object of a detailed “genetic” critique by a team of experts
under the direction of Michel Contat of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
subsequently published asPourquois et comment Sartre a e ́crit “les Mots,” 2 nd edn. (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1997 ); hereafterPSM.
1